The Collected Short Stories

by Jean Rhys

  The Summing-up. The magistrate, Mr Somers, said that this was a very disturbing case. ‘There is no direct evidence that it was Mr Longa who first attacked the child, causing the extensive bruising. He denies it strongly, and the child cannot yet be questioned. I find his statement as read by Counsel for the Defence convincing up to a point. Two things, however, strike me as unlikely. Why should he think that this unfortunate child would know anything about English music halls or the tricks performed there? Why should his mentioning them reassure her? It probably added to her fright. Also, and more important: however drunk he was, could he have picked up a badly injured naked child and carried her to the plank without noticing the marks on her body? According to Mr Longa he noticed nothing, but proceeded with his savage joke. I find this so unlikely as to be almost incredible. He excuses himself by saying that he had been drinking, but he is a man accustomed to strong drink and there is no report of advanced intoxication from the police who arrested him.

  ‘I am not here to speculate and I cannot accept either hearsay evidence or innuendoes supported by no evidence; but I have not been in my post for twenty years without learning that it is extremely difficult to obtain direct evidence here. Often a criminal is quite well-known, but the police find it impossible to produce a single witness against him. There is, unfortunately, in these islands a great distrust both of the police and of the law.’

  Here a voice interrupted: ‘Can you blame them?’ and there was a hubbub in the Court. Several women were in tears. Order was only restored when a threat was made to clear the Court.

  Mr Somers continued: ‘We can only hope that this perhaps natural distrust will diminish with time. In view of my doubts I am glad to hear that Mr Longa is willing to leave the island. I direct that his passage to Southampton be paid by the Government. Until he sails he must remain in custody of the police, but must be allowed to receive visitors. He must be able to get food or provisions from outside and care must be taken to restore him to health. I am sure that his able Counsel will see that my instructions are carried out.’

  The crowd was subdued and less talkative than usual as it left the court-room, but a group of rowdies shouted at Mr Penrice as he came out. He took no notice of this demonstration, but got into his waiting trap and drove off. A few stones were thrown after him, but the rowdies quickly dispersed when a policeman intervened.

  *

  ‘I bet you anything Mamie Lambton’s going to start another subscription,’ said Matthew Penrice to his wife when he got home. He added: ‘Don’t look so gloomy, Maggie. I’ve got one piece of very good news. Octavia tells me that she’s been corresponding with an old friend in St Lucia with no children of her own who wishes to adopt Jojo. She’s quite sure of this woman and says it’ll be the best thing possible. I think so too. She’d get right away from all the gossip and questioning here, and start again. I’ll see to it she gets there as soon as she’s well enough. I’ll take care of everything, don’t worry.’

  Maggie Penrice watched the Negro maid Janet pile the coffee things onto the tray and walk out, silent, bare-footed. When she said ‘What delicious coffee, Janet’, the girl hadn’t answered, hadn’t even smiled. But they don’t smile here, they laugh, they seldom smile. Not smilers with a knife. No? Even when they were alone she didn’t speak, but went on folding and unfolding the letter. She re-read the last paragraph.

  ‘Thank you for the money you sent. I will keep it faithfully and carefully for her when she grows up and thank you from my heart for giving her to me. You would be pleased to see her. She is getting quite fat and pretty and hardly ever wakes up screaming as she used to do. I now close and say no more from my overflowing heart. Wishing you and your amiable lady all health and prosperity. Anine Dib.’

  Maggie said: ‘Dib. What a funny name.’

  ‘Syrian, probably,’ Matt said. ‘Well, that’s the last of that, I hope, and now you mustn’t worry any more. Much the best thing that could have happened. Surely you agree?’

  ‘Perhaps . . . But Matt, do you think it was wise to send her away quite so quickly?’

  ‘The sooner the better, I should have thought. Why not?’

  The room was at the back of the house, there was no noise from the street. It was hot and airless and the blinds were half drawn. She folded the letter carefully and put it back into its envelope, then pushed it across to him.

  ‘Because it’s all over the place that Octavia’s in your pay and that you both sent the child to St Lucia so that there was no chance of her ever talking. They’re saying that you did it and pushed it off onto Jimmy Longa. The whole thing is utterly ridiculous, of course, but you ought to stop it.’

  ‘Stop it? What do you want me to do? How can I stop it?’

  ‘Surely that wouldn’t be too hard. It’s so absurd. How could you have done it – how is it even possible?’

  ‘Do you think these damnable hogs care whether it’s possible or not, or how or where or when? They’ve just got hold of something to grunt about, that’s all. If you think I’m going to argue with this lot you must be mad. I’ve had more than enough of this whole damned place. If you really want to know what I feel, I want to clear out. It’s not this particular storm in a tea-cup that’s decided me. I’ve wanted to leave for some time, and you must have known it.’

  ‘They’ll say you’ve run away.’

  ‘God, can’t you get it into your head that I don’t give a damn what they say here? Oh come on, Maggie, don’t look like that. I know how you feel, how you dread the cold, how much better you are here, and its beauty and all that – I only wish I felt like you, but to me it’s suffocating.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But I hoped you’d feel better when we left Roseau.’

  ‘The hatred would be exactly the same in the country – suppressed, perhaps. If you don’t want to leave you needn’t. I won’t sell Three Rivers or this house, and the money will be all right – surely you know that?’

  ‘But Matt, you find envy, malice, hatred everywhere. You can’t escape.’

  ‘Perhaps, but I’m sick of this particular brand.’

  ‘Do you think I’d want to stay here by myself if you went? Do you really think that?’

  He didn’t answer but smiled and said: ‘Then that’s settled.’ He patted her shoulder lightly, then he went over to an armchair, took up a book; but Maggie, watching him anxiously, cautiously, saw that he never turned a page. Suddenly she screwed up her eyes tightly and shook her head. She was trying to fight the overwhelming certainty that the man she was looking at was a complete stranger.

  Overture and Beginners Please

  We were sitting by the fire in the small dining-room when Camilla said ‘I hate my parents, don’t you?’ Hail was rattling against the curtained windows. I had been told all about snow long before I left the West Indies, hail was a surprise and exciting in its way. I thought I’d be laughed at if I asked what it was.

  Another dark yellow curtain hung over the door which led into a passage and beyond that were the empty classrooms, for this was the week after Christmas and the day girls and other seven boarders had gone home for their holidays.

  ‘And what’s more,’ said Camilla, ‘they hate me. They like my younger sister. A lot of that sort of thing goes on in families but it’s hushed up of course.’

  It was almost dark, I was almost warm, so I said, ‘I don’t hate mine. They gave a farewell dance for me before I left. We had a band. It’s funny, I can remember exactly the face of the man with the shak-shak.’

  ‘How comic,’ said Camilla who seemed annoyed.

  ‘They play well. Different music of course.’

  ‘Why did they send you to the old Perse if they were so fond of you?’

  ‘Because my English aunt said it was a good school.’

  ‘That’s the one who won’t have you with her for Christmas, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well she is sick – ill, I mean.’

  ‘She says! How do you like it now you are here?’

&n
bsp; ‘I like it all right, but the chilblains on my hands hurt.’

  Then she said I would have lots of time to find out if I did like it as she was leaving the next day to stay with friends at Thaxted. ‘Miss Born has all of Charlotte M. Yonge’s novels lined up for you to read in the evenings.’

  ‘Oh Lord, she hasn’t!’

  ‘Just you wait,’ said Camilla.

  The maid came in to light up and soon it would be time to go upstairs and change for dinner. I thought this woman one of the most fascinating I had ever seen. She had a long thin face, dead white, or powdered dead white. Her hair was black and lively under her cap, her eyes so small that the first time I saw her I thought she was blind. But wide open, they were the most astonishing blue, cornflower blue, no, more like sparks of blue fire. Then she would drop her eyelids and her face would go dead and lifeless again. I never tired of watching this transformation.

  After dinner there I was, reading aloud The Dove in the Eagle’s Nest. Camilla didn’t listen, nor did Miss Rode, our headmistress, who was a middle-aged very imposing woman with quantities of black-grey hair arranged like a coronet. She dressed in various shades of brown, purple, puce or mustard and her face was serene and kind.

  Miss Born however never took her eyes off me. Miss Born was old, she wore black, she never taught. She represented breeding and culture and was a great asset to the school. ‘Drop your voice,’ she would say, ‘drop it. An octave at least’; or ‘That will do, don’t go on, I really cannot bear any more tonight.’

  We sat around the fire till the clock struck nine. ‘Good night Miss Rode.’ ‘Good night, dear child,’ said Miss Rode, who was wearing her purple, always a good sign. ‘Good night Miss Born.’ Miss Born inclined her head very slightly and as I went out remarked, ‘Why did you insist on that girl playing Autolycus? Tony Lumpkin in person.’

  ‘Not in person, surely,’ said Miss Rode mildly.

  ‘In manner then, in manner,’ said Miss Born.

  Camilla shut the door and I heard no more.

  The staircase was slippery and smelt of floor polish. All the way up to the bedroom floor I thought about Miss Born’s black clothes, her small active body. A mouse with a parrot’s head. I hadn’t even wanted to be in the old Winter’s Tale and I told them so. However, I said nothing of all this to Camilla for I had been five months in England and was slowly learning to be cautious. Besides the bedrooms were unheated and I had already begun to shiver and shake.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s frightfully cold, Camilla?’

  ‘No, not particularly. Hop into bed and you’ll soon get warm.’ She went off to her own room four doors away.

  I knew of course that I would not sleep or get warm for on top of everything else an icy wind was blowing through the window, which for some mysterious reason must be left open six inches at the top.

  Do not shut your window. This window must not be closed.

  I was still awake and shivering, clutching my ankles with my hands, when the maid, who was called Jarvis, knocked. ‘I’ve brought you up a hot water bottle miss.’

  ‘Oh thank you. How awfully kind of you.’

  ‘It is my own hot water bottle,’ she said. She asked why I didn’t shut my window.

  ‘Well, I thought we weren’t supposed to.’

  She pushed the sash up without answering. I stretched my legs out and put the bottle where my back hurt and thanked her again. I hoped she’d go away but she lingered.

  ‘I wanted to tell you miss, that I enjoyed the school play this term very much. You were good in that boy’s part.’

  ‘Autolycus.’

  ‘Well, I don’t remember the name but you quite cheered me up.’

  ‘I’m very glad,’ I said. ‘Good night Jarvis, don’t catch cold in this icy little room.’

  ‘I had a great success once in an amateur theatrical performance,’ she went on dreamily. ‘I played the part of a blind girl.’

  ‘You played a blind girl? How strange, because when I saw you first I thought . . .’ I stopped. ‘I thought you might be able to act because you don’t look at all wooden.’

  ‘The flowers I had sent me,’ she said. ‘Roses and that. Of course, it was long ago, when I was a girl, but I still remember my part, every word of it’

  ‘How very nice’ was all I could think of to say. She snapped the light out and shut the door, rather loudly.

  She played a blind girl. I thought she was blind. But this sort of thing had happened to me before. I’d stopped trying to make sense of clues that led nowhere.

  When, next day after breakfast, Camilla left I got through the morning thinking no bicycle ride anyhow. Patey isn’t here.

  Miss Patey had been trying to teach me to bicycle. She always skimmed gracefully ahead as though she had nothing to do with me and I followed her, wobbling dangerously from side to side. Once when I’d fallen into a ditch on the way to Newnham, she turned back and asked in a detached way if I’d hurt myself. ‘Oh no, Miss Patey, not at all.’ I climbed out of the ditch and picked up the bicycle. ‘I see your stocking is torn and that is quite a bruise on your knee.’ She did not speak again until we got to the Trumpington Road. ‘You had better get down and wheel your bicycle here.’ ‘Yes, Miss Patey.’

  Limping along the Trumpington Road . . . past Mrs G’s house, a distant relative of my father’s. I was allowed to have tea with her every Saturday afternoon . . . She was called Jeanette and was a very lovely, stately old lady with thick white hair, huge black eyes and a classic profile. She didn’t wear spectacles except for reading and her hands were slender and transparent looking. She talked about Cambridge when she was young and the famous men she’d known. ‘Poor Darwin. He threaded the labyrinths of creation and lost his Creator.’ Or ‘Of course Fitzgerald’s translation from the Persian was not really accurate . . . ’; and the Song of Solomon was an allegory of Christ and His Church.

  Another day she told me that she had nearly eloped (tired of her absentminded old husband, I suppose). She was packed and ready to leave but when she was pinning on her hat she saw in the looking-glass the devil grinning over her shoulder. She was so frightened that she changed her mind.

  ‘And what did the devil look like?’ I asked, very curious. But she never told me that.

  Like so many beautiful old ladies then she had a devoted maid whom I was rather afraid of, she looked at me so sternly, so unsmilingly when she opened the door. Now I come to think of it, Jarvis didn’t smile either.

  None of the girls could believe that I’d never owned a bicycle before or that there were very few in the island. ‘How do you get about then, if there are no trains, buses, cars or bicycles?’ they would say. ‘Horses, mules, carriages, buggies, traps.’ Winks, smiles. ‘Is it “honey don’t try so hard” or “honey don’t cry so hard”?’ ‘How should I know?’ ‘Well, it’s a coon song, you ought to know.’ But when I discovered that though they never believed the truth, they swallowed the most fantastic lies, I amused myself a good deal.

  That first afternoon when I had walked along the gravel path which circled the muddy green hockey field, I crossed a flower bed and looked into one of the dim classrooms. It was a grey-yellow day. Not so bad as the white glaring days or the icy wind days. Still, bad enough. The sky was the colour of no hope, but they don’t notice it, they are used to it, they expect me to grow used to it.

  It was while I was staring at the empty ghostly-looking desks that I felt a lump in my throat. Tears – my heart a heavy jagged weight. Of course premonitions, presentiments had brushed me before, cold and clammy as a bat’s wing, but nothing like this. Despair, grey-yellow like their sky. I stayed by the window in the cold thinking ‘What is going to become of me? Why am I here at all?’

  One hot silent July afternoon I was told that I was to go to England with my Aunt Clare, who had been staying with us for the last six months. I was to go to a school called The Perse in Cambridge.

  ‘It is very good of her to take charge of you.’ I noticed that
my father was looking at me in a critical, disapproving way. ‘I am sure,’ he said, ‘that it will do you a great deal of good.’

  ‘I sincerely hope so,’ said Aunt Clare dubiously.

  This interview chilled me and I was silent all that evening. (So, I noticed, was my mother.) I went up to my bedroom early and took out the exercise book that I called ‘Secret Poems’.

  I am going to England

  What shall I find there?

  ‘No matter what

  Not what I sought’ said Byron.

  Not what I sought,

  Not what I seek.

  I wrote no more poems for a very long time.

  Unfortunately it was a grey lowering August in London, not cold but never bright or fresh. My Aunt Clare, a tireless walker, dragged me round to see all the sights and after a week I went to sleep in the most unlikely places: St Paul’s, Westminster Abbey, Madame Tussaud’s, the Wallace Collection, the zoo, even a shop or two. She was a swift but absentminded walker and I could easily lag behind and find a chair or bench to droop on.

  ‘She can’t help it,’ I heard her explain once. ‘It’s the change of climate, but it can really be very annoying.’

  Mistake after mistake.

  But I knew the exact day when I lost belief in myself and cold caution took control. It was when she bought me the ugly dress instead of the pretty wine-coloured one.

  ‘It’s a perfect fit,’ said the saleswoman, ‘and the young lady is so pale, she needs colour.’

  My aunt looked at the price ticket. ‘No, not at all suitable,’ she said and chose a drab dress which I disliked. I didn’t argue for the big shop and the saleswoman whom I thought very beautiful bewildered me. But I was heartbroken. I’d have to appear before a lot of strange girls in this hideous garment. ‘They’re bound to dislike me.’